Norwegian Patent Specification 161,867 describes an oil boom conferring a number of advantages. When in use, this oil boom is in the form of an elongate hose-shaped floating body from which a skirt descends into the water, thus acting, together with the floating body, as a barrage against oil spills on or near the water surface. The skirt is maintained in its descending position by sinkers provided at the lower skirt edge. The floating body is maintained in a distended hose-shaped state by means of tensioning elements in the form of inflatable hoses disposed in pockets on the inside of the hose-shaped floating body. The oil boom is often manufactured in 50-100-m lengths, and several oil booms can be linked together to obtain an overall length of 500 m or even more.
A considerable advantage of this prior-art oil boom is that it can be produced as a flat unit and can be stored in a flat state on drums, whence it can be removed for mounting and subsequent placing on the site of use in a relatively short time. One drawback inherent in this oil boom is however that the inflatable hoses that are used for distending the floating body have insufficient rigidity in the inflated state and, therefore, do not always impart the requisite stability and distension capacity to the boom when in use. This is indeed a major shortcoming, since oil booms are often used under extreme weather conditions with high winds and rough sea. In case the distended floating body should collapse over a short stretch of its length, considerable amounts of collected oil may again be dissipated, which is of course detrimental to the oil clearing result and the environmental consequences of the oil spill.
This shortcoming of the known oil boom is primarily ascribable to the inflatable hoses which are used for distending the floating body and which are made of a pliable unextendible material, giving rise to creases or folds when the straight hoses are bent into ring shape during the distension of the oil boom. Moreover, when using such pliable unextendible material, sealing problems have also been encountered where the hoses are connected to couplings.